Google's recent launch of YouTube Music is its latest in a series of attempts over several years to create a compelling paid music offering. Now that Spotify and Apple Music each have subscriberships well into the tens of millions, this is serious business — and Google is late to the party. What Google just launched and how it got there provide a window into the state of both the digital music industry today and Google's position within it.

YouTube by itself is the most popular digital music service in the world, mainly because it's free and unlimited. The music on YouTube is contributed by users, not (just) record labels, so it has the largest catalog of any legal music service (although its legality has been a point of contention with the music industry). Unlike Pandora, it lets users select the music they want to play, and unlike Spotify's free service, it lets users play unlimited amounts of music and not listen to ads.

Yet Google's approach to music services has been in disarray for some time. For the past few years it has maintained two music services: YouTube and Google Play Music. YouTube, of course, wasn't a music service by design, but music listening has become one of the most popular uses of YouTube. Many people use it for music because they already use it for other purposes, they can't get a paid subscription on another music service, or they want to check out the videos that their social network likes.

But for serious music fans who want a more orderly experience, YouTube is kind of a mess. People like that (such as, full disclosure, myself) might use it to find dubiously legal clips of favorite bands performing live or obscure music that isn't available on the subscription services, but we wouldn't use it as our primary music service.

Then there's Google Play Music, which Google launched in late 2011 as an iTunes-style paid download service with cloud storage. This was one of a few content apps that Google introduced for the Android platform to compete with Apple's iOS/iTunes/iBooks ecosystem. Then, in May 2013, Google added a paid on-demand subscription option to compete with Spotify, which it called All Access. Google Play Music got some traction as part of the out-of-the-box Android environment but nowhere near the public profile of iTunes, Pandora or Spotify (or YouTube), in part because Google didn't expend much effort to market it. Eventually, the "All Access" moniker faded away, and now "Google Play Music" encompasses the paid subscription service as well as paid downloads and other features.

Google Play Music and YouTube are in different divisions of Google and originally had little to do with each other. Google's first attempt at bridging the gap between the two was YouTube Music Key, which launched in late 2014 and offered ad-free music videos and background playing (listening to music while using another app on your device) for $10 per month or equivalents in other countries. Google Play Music subscribers got YouTube Music Key access, and Google began integrating videos from YouTube into the Google Play Music app.

Music Key wasn't very successful, in part because many record labels wouldn't license their material to the service. Less than a year later, Google replaced it with YouTube Red, which offered paid ad-free access to all videos, not just music.

The new YouTube Music is one part of a new set of paid subscription services based on YouTube. (The other part is YouTube Premium, which supersedes YouTube Red. Confused yet?) YouTube Music attempts to do several things at once, and it succeeds at some more than others.

Meanwhile, record labels have been less than thrilled at the payouts from YouTube's ad revenue share model, which are considerably lower than what they receive from paid subscriptions. They have been pushing for better terms as they renegotiate their license deals with YouTube. On the other side of those negotiations is Lyor Cohen, the former record label executive who (at Warner Music Group) did the first major-label licensing deal with YouTube back in 2006. Cohen clearly sees a win-win here: by moving from ad revenue from free YouTube viewing to paid subscription revenue, Google increases per-play revenue to music rights holders and latches onto the industry's fastest-growing user base.

But to move Google's paid music subscribership into Spotify and Apple Music territory requires a music service that's compelling enough to compete with those other services and possibly draw people away from them. And that's where YouTube Music is uneven.

The biggest problem with YouTube Music compared with Spotify and Apple Music is its lack of human curation. Spotify and Apple Music have both invested heavily in resources for tasks such as creating curated playlists, working with artists to present their music properly, and cleaning up music metadata — tasks that can be unglamorous gruntwork and don't benefit from the scale economies beloved by the tech industry. There is no quick fix for this, and it's not in Google's DNA.

On the other hand, YouTube Music is poised to benefit from the enormous amount of data about music listenership it has from YouTube. It claims to be using all that data, plus some AI-related techniques such as machine learning, to discover data about and relationships among music videos and listenership data to help improve search and recommendations.

As a result, YouTube Music should be worthwhile for music fans who like watching videos and particularly like the one-video-leads-to-another style of navigation that YouTube promotes. Think of it as Google Play Music with videos as more of a central offering instead of a grafted-on afterthought. Its search results and recommendations include user-uploaded YouTube videos as much as they include record label-supplied music. It offers lots of video content that Spotify and Apple Music can't, and it's pretty good at organizing that content around artists, songs, genres, and so on. Google is also able to flex its considerable search-engine muscle on the service to give you search results that the others can't.

But YouTube Music also has drawbacks. Some are related to the fact that some people watch music videos on YouTube for other purposes than they might listen to music on a pure music service. For example, it has a feature called Your Mixtape, which is Google's attempt at creating a single personalized music channel for every user, optimized for factors such as your location and the time of day. (This is something of a Holy Grail among music services; Deezer launched a similar feature called Flow in 2014, while Pandora launched its equivalent just days ago.) When I started using YouTube Music on my Android phone and clicked on Your Mixtape, it mined my fairly significant history of YouTube usage and showed me... videos of music backing tracks that I had been using recently for guitar practice. It's admittedly too early to tell how successful Your Mixtape will be, because such features need time and user feedback to work well.

If you're serious about music, don't care about videos, and want to see authoritative information about the music you're listening to, then YouTube Music falls short. When you click on an artist, it doesn't give you any information about the artist and doesn't show albums with release dates or in chronological order of recording. It has the now-customary "radio stations" by genre and artist, and they are customizable by the usual thumbs-up/thumbs-down options, but they are clearly generated by algorithms, not music experts as they are on other services.

Worse, some of the metadata that YouTube Music uses comes from unverified crowdsourced input and is just plain wrong. For example I found entire albums that show up as single tracks because someone uploaded them to YouTube that way (and got past YouTube's Content ID copyright filtering system), and I found tracks with incorrect information, such as a live video by the Yes splinter group Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe that a user mislabeled as Yes.

It's entirely possible that YouTube can use the ton of data it has about YouTube usage habits for music listening to fashion a user experience for YouTube Music that caters to those users in ways that Spotify and Apple and the others can't. The question is whether that experience will bring in enough new subscribers. The other question is whether Google will stop the drumbeat (pun intended) of confusing name changes and start marketing YouTube Music to consumers in a focused way. Given Google's past track record, this may be the biggest question of them all.

In its current form, YouTube Music is unlikely to draw many Spotify or Apple Music subscribers away from those services. There may be enough growth left in paid subscription music streaming for Google to become a serious competitor; otherwise, Google may be doomed to perpetual catch-up mode in subscription music services.

Bill Rosenblatt runs GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consultancy that focuses on digital media technology, business models, and copyright. Check him out on LinkedIn or Twitter.

I am the founder of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm whose clients include content providers and digital media technology companies ranging from early stage startups to Global 500, as well as public policy entities related to copyright in the digita...